Researchers

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Your Twitter postings may reveal not only your hobbies, politics and celebrity obsessions, but also whether you are a psychopath, according to researchers at Florida Atlantic University. A computer science professor and doctoral student have conducted a study with the London-based Online Privacy Foundation that showed how users' word choices can indicate personality traits. If you swear too much online or use words like "die," "kill," or "bury" a lot, you might have psychopathic tendencies, the research found.

University of Florida researchers have received a $2.7 million grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to evaluate whether a common medication can help women with HIV reduce their alcohol consumption and improve their overall health. "Alcohol consumption can be harmful in persons with HIV infection if it affects the ability to take medications on schedule, causes people to make poor decisions, or has direct harmful effects on the immune system or other parts of the body," said the study's lead investigator Robert Cook, M.D., M.P.H., an associate professor of epidemiology and medicine at the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions and the College of Medicine.

Researchers are warning that popular herbs and supplements, including St. John's wort and even garlic and ginger, do not mix well with common heart drugs and can also be dangerous for patients taking statins, blood thinners and blood pressure medications. St. John's wort raises blood pressure and heart rate, and garlic and ginger increase the risk of bleeding in patients on blood thinners, the researchers said. Even grapefruit juice can be risky, increasing the effects of calcium-channel blockers and statins, they said.

Oops. If your family has lived, or at least survived, by the five-second rule, researchers at San Diego State University say you may be living on borrowed time. You know the rule: If food falls to the floor and you grab it back within five seconds, you can still eat it. Without, you know, dying. Granted, the study was funded by Clorox Co., which is all about disinfecting surfaces. But experiments in dropping carrots and sippy cups on a typical floor found that germs do indeed attach themselves within five seconds.

Diabetics with kidney disease who are taking high doses of B vitamins in an effort to forestall heart attacks should stop taking them immediately because they are potentially very harmful, Canadian researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Rather than reducing the risk of heart attack and stroke, the vitamins appear to actually increase it, the researchers said in April. About 21 million Americans and 3 million Canadians have either Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes, and it is thought that at least 40 percent of them will develop diabetic nephropathy, in which the function of the kidneys is impaired.

While looking for bird feathers in the Everglades, two University of Florida researchers got lost overnight Monday. Associates in Miami reported Becky Hylton, 25, and Martin Ruane, 31, missing after they failed to return Monday night, the Broward Sheriff's Office said. That afternoon, the pair had parked their airboat on Rescue Strand Island, about six miles west of U.S. 27. As night began to fall, they noticed their compass was malfunctioning and, lost, sought out a dry spot to spend the night, said Sheriff's Office spokesman Jim Leljedal.

The power of emotions to override even the most rational of decisions may be explained by a new discovery about the brain, researchers say. The data suggest that the brain is arranged so key aspects of emotional life, like primitive fears, can operate largely independent of thought. This arrangement may explain why certain emotional reactions, like phobias, are so tenacious despite their obvious irrationality, as well as other baffling facts of emotional life, such as why troubling experiences from life`s earliest years can have such powerful effects decades later.

GAINESVILLE -- Researchers say they have genetically altered wheat for the first time, an achievement that could help lead to improved yields around the world. Scientists at the University of Florida and the Monsanto Co. said on Tuesday that the foreign gene they had introduced into wheat had produced an enzyme that had rendered many powerful herbicides harmless to the wheat. The work is to be reported in the June issue of the journal Bio/Technology. An author of the report, Dr. Indra K. Vasil of the university`s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, said that a field of wheat with the newly introduced trait could be treated with modern herbicides, such as those made by Monsanto, to control weeds without harming the wheat.